Lori Rasmussen

This morning I was thinking back to a family trip we took to Chichen Itza, the famous Mayan archaeological site in the Yucatan Peninsula. Although our tour guide pledged to edit some of the more graphic details as he described the actives that took place there hundreds of years ago since our little one was present, we still knew we were walking in a place where little children were brutally sacrificed to the gods the Mayans worshipped. It made me more than a little squeamish, but it’s history, right? That civilization has ended.

Or has it? It occurs to me now that so many present-day Americans worship at a different altar: the false god they call their guns. We’ve all seen the pics on social media; white families with their children, grinning from ear to to ear with their gun collections spread out before them like Christmas morning. They believe THEY would never break the law, so why should THEIR guns be taken away. That those guns are good for nothing but ripping bodies to shreds is irrelevant. They will come at you with this weird, smug, self satisfied notion that people who don’t know the correct nomenclature for these weapons don’t deserve a voice, as if it matters two shits what “AR” actually stands for. It doesn’t matter to them that those weapons are being used to slaughter children. They WANT them. And so they shall HAVE them. And they want LOTS of them and, like the spoiled bad egg Veruca Salt, they want them now. No background checks, no red flag laws, no sensible restrictions aimed only at keeping them out of the hands of people who would use these “modern sporting rifles” for the “sport” of hunting innocent people. They worship these guns, and they are happy to hold the rest of our nation hostage to their emotional need to cling to an insipid belief in a gun-daddy-god that will protect them. And, like Veruca Salt’s feckless father, we have given into their reckless demands because we are too chickenshit to just tell them “no.”

Last week, we sacrificed 19 children and two of their teachers on the altar of worship to these vile false gods. And that was only the most recent sacrifice. We are no better than the Mayans. Maybe it’s time for this civilization to meet a similar fate.